Firefox 28 Arrives On The Desktop, But There’s Little To Get Excited About

The latest version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser has been made available for download.

But before you strain yourself while reaching for the nearest download button, be aware that there is not a whole lot to get excited by in Firefox 28.

In fact, for those of us on Linux there are only a handful of cross-plaform under-the-bonnet changes to enjoy:

VP9 video decoding

HTML5 audio/video Volume Control

Opus WebM Support

SPDY 2 retired

Security fixes

Not that these tweaks aren’t welcome; improvement is improvement, however minor it may seem. And it’s great to see Firefox finally add support for VP9 decoding. Google Chrome introduced support for this open, royalty free compression standard in February of last year.

Mac users will find a bit more on offer, including Notification Centre support. Android users will find native text selection, cut, and copy items; more share buttons; and predictive lookup from the Awesome Bar.

Firefox 29, due next month, is tentatively set to introduce the ‘new’ Australis interface on Windows, Mac and Linux, though there has been murmuring that this could be held back to the subsequent release.

Getting Firefox 28

As with every release, you don’t need to do anything special to update. Firefox 28 will be made available on Ubuntu 12.04 and 13.10 through the Software Updater in the coming day or so.